Solar in Nigeria

No, this isn’t one of those e-mail scams where the second cousin of the prince of Nigeria wants to give you $10 million if you’ll just pass along your social security number and first-born child to a secret e-mail address.

This is Novastar Energy, a solar company from right here in San Antonio that has just returned from a trip to Nigeria where it installed a 5 kilowatt-hour solar system for a government building in Lagos.

That size of a system could power a typical American house for about half a day, said Aaron K. Geer, a partner with Novastar.

Geer also said that the Nigerians don’t use as much energy as Americans, so the system Novastar installed might power more than half of the Nigerian building.

Novastar was started just over one year ago, and it has completed a few residential projects around San Antonio in addition to this. The company’s in talks with the Nigerians to do much more work in the future.

So the question I had: How do a small San Antonio startup and the Nigerian government get hooked up?